onfocus

Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work or the automation of everything, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, and most of this work falls far outside the realm of innovation.

This 2016 article about innovation, maintenance, and our attention feels especially relevant in our 2024 AI hype bubble. I would love to see maintenance become a core value of our society because that would improve our daily lives so much more than innovation does.

Trust in AI technology and the companies that develop it is dropping, in both the U.S. and around the world, according to new data from Edelman shared first with Axios.

Not much to this summary, but interesting to hear AI skepticism is on the rise even as it's being built into every technology product.

In recent years, the web has become increasingly monopolized by the small group of powerful companies that have come to be known as "Big Tech". He will hear no argument from me on that point, although the role his own company played in that particular shift is a large and completely unmentioned elephant in the room throughout a book in which he continually condemns these "power brokers" and "capricious gatekeepers" that "squelch competitors" and keep a "stranglehold ... on our lives".

We're all trying to find the guy who did this.

Speaking of newsletters that recently moved away from Substack, Molly White's Citation Needed is always great and this review of a recent "bestselling" crypto hype book is devastating and hilarious.

Obviously a guaranteed ten percent raise is wonderful, and I assumed that whatever subscriber losses I suffered in migrating would at least be offset by that. But in fact, as you can see, paid subscriptions are significantly higher since the move. There were about 175 new paid subscribers in my first two days on Beehiiv, which looks to me like a direct measure of the demand that was being suppressed by potential customers not wanting to pay for Substack.

I'm one of these 175 that didn't want to pay for Substack. Nice to see the transparency here and it's great to be able to support and read Tabs again. I hope others can follow Rusty's lead.

All of the major tech companies conducting another wave of layoffs this year are sitting atop mountains of cash and are wildly profitable, so the job-shedding is far from a matter of necessity or survival.

Short term stock boost is more important than people. Thanks, job creators!

Helping Nazis grow subscription newsletter businesses is ultimately best for the world, reasons Hamish McKenzie.

Nazi sympathizers going bankrupt is ultimately best for the world. Please delete your Substack account and encourage people using it to go elsewhere.

I link to the Substack domain here a lot. There is a bunch of good indie writing there but I can’t link to it anymore. I know this site doesn’t drive any traffic anywhere, so no loss to Substack. But it is a loss to me to support these awful people in any small way. Anyway, the people at the top of these venture backed Silicon Valley companies are not helping create a better place for us.

Google's default search deal with Apple is worth so much to the search giant that Google pays 36 percent of its search advertising revenue from Safari to keep its search engine set as the default in Apple's browser, Bloomberg reported.

Google pays a high price to be the default search option everywhere.

Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley.

Neil Postman explained why this strain of techno utopianism is dangerous in the early 90s in his book Technopoly. We have even more evidence supporting his warnings since then. This "manifesto" displays such depressingly retrograde thinking from the people with money.

…most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism, and so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they're genius outliers who can see things others can't, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. "I must be smart, look how rich I am."

Anil on the brainworms that seem to be infecting the billionaire class. It sounds like a bizzaro normalcy bias driving extremism. Surely something would be stopping me if my views were out of bounds. But there are no bounds in our society once you have a certain amount of money.

Recently I remembered a thing that existed when I was younger: “person who does not wear a watch.” The wearing (or not) of watches wasn’t a neutral characteristic, like having blond or brown hair. The not wearing a watch was a fact that might be stated in, say, the profile of an important person or celebrity, that signified bemusement and reverence for a certain characteristic: they are unbound by time; they don’t have much concern about when they get places, or when other things happen.

Excellent thoughts by Casey Johnston on becoming less tethered by sitting with thoughts and anxieties as they come up instead of reaching for screens. Reminds me of Pema Chodron’s explanation of shenpa which I’ve found helpful.

A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.

Posting to social media was supposed to be harmless.

“I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.

That's it, I'm pressing the independent thought alarm.